I hang out in Himmel Park, halfway across town, happy in the spontaneous gathering of other kids like me; there’s always somebody there, but on Saturdays it’s a sort of festival: field of patched blue denim, smoke of incense weaving in the air, little bells tied to handwoven sashes, sewn to backpacks and bell-bottom jeans. There’s a band that’ll play for free, if we can get up the cash to rent a generator. I smoke my first joint in the basement stairwell of a dark apartment building on Speedway, where I’ve stopped while I’m walking the miles home from the park. Someone’s said, “Hey, you want to turn on? I’ll lay this joint on you.” I am expectant, thrilled, but I can’t decide if anything happens at all: are those streetlights brighter, those headlights sparkling? Next time, smoking a pipe full of dope cured in opium, no doubt about it: suddenly I am loose with laughter, the tension in my body uncoiling, as if I’ve a thunderstorm in me, blue-black rainclouds moving up my spine, beautiful, full of promise. Driving around in the desert with Dino, we stop on some dark turnout off an unpaved road to toke up. Dino’s parents are well-off; they live in a beautiful Hacienda Bellas Artes–style casa, shady archways around the blue tile of the pool, and he never seems to lack for resources. His parents won’t let him grow long hair, but he sports emblematic round wire-rims and a Guatemalan poncho woven in twenty shades of sheep. He likes me, I think, because I’m distinguished from his other friends by my what-the-hell attitude: show me what I won’t do. His other friends, the kids he’s grown up with, who live in his neighborhood and are expected to go on to Good Schools, conduct themselves a bit more carefully, but I’m hell-bent for the next experience. He cures his dope in hash, then burns it in a pipe of tempered glass whose liquid chamber he’s filled with Drambuie. One night we look up from our dedicated inhalations to find a saguaro owl sitting right in front of us on the ground, appraising us, half his six-inch height given over to his enormous eyes.

Now begins a kind of blur, in memory, a swirl, shadowy on the edges, whose primary elements are my mother’s inebriation and my own.

I’ve planted the seeds culled from a lid of grass in a large Mexican flowerpot, thinned the sprouts to the single strongest, and grown, in the sunny window of my room, a resplendent six-foot marijuana plant, the picture of radiant health, its buds and flowers waxy with resin. I inform my parents that it is a Mexican bean. I take great care with the harvest, which is potent and enormous, my own private shoe box full of dope.